USING classic machines

I have used 'modern' PC's (well, at least pentiums with 16 MBytes RAM, SVGA card, etc), and I know I'm not missing _anything_ by sticking to classic computers. Let's go through your points. 'Web pages in full photo quality colour'. Well, I access the web to get information, not look at pretty pictures. Most of the information I want is _text_, or at least monochrome graphics (things like IC data sheets). So I don't need 'photo quality colour'. And if I did, I could easily find a classic system that could display them. Evans and Sutherland, Grinnell, Ramtek, I2S, PPL, etc all made high-res colour displays that make most PC's look like toys. And you can pick one up second-hand for less than an SVGA card + monitor. 'Realistic games'. I don't play many games, but I'll agree that modern games running on modern hardware do _look_ a lot more realistic than the text+block graphics we had on home computers 15 years ago. The problem is that IMHO (and YMMV) the old games are just more fun to play. That's a personal judgement, though. 'PPP connections' Oh come on. I've run a PPP client on an _XT_. No problem at all. I'll happily believe they're available for other old machines as well. 'Realaudio' I assume that's some audio standard for modern machines. But we had good quality audio on PDP11's (thanks to a little board from 3RCC) in 1976. It's not exactly hard to add a DAC and a DMA engine or even a DSP to a lot of classic computers (and classic computer != cheap home micro so there's easily enough RAM space for a reasonable length sample). What I'd be missing by going to a modern machine would be : Documentation. Since I don't just run prepackaged software and plug in prebuilt hardware, I need good technical manuals. They just don't exist for most modern machines Repairability. I can fix classic computers with no problem at all. Just try getting a custom chip for a PC motherboard. And don't tell me to replace the motherboard - if the PC is a few years old I'd probably have to replace the CPU and memory as well. -- -tony ard12(a)eng.cam.ac.uk The gates in my computer are AND,OR and NOT, not Bill